Five little-known search marketing tips for the travel sector

Watch your business reap the benefits as you apply each of our
handy, up-to-the-minute SEO & PPC tips.

1. Get your singulars
and plurals right

Whether to target singular or plural versions of specific search
terms is not an issue in paid search; the more search term
variations the better. But in SEO, you need to decide how to
optimise for singulars and plurals.

A page on your site could be optimised to rank for as many
search terms as you want. But each term you promote will diminish
that page's ability to rank for your most popular search term.

You could always target more pages, with each page targeting a
different search term. But is there any value in creating different
pages for 'hotel in York' and 'hotels in York'? And even if there
was, would it be worth the risk of being penalised by the search
engines because they assume the pages exist only for SEO
reasons?

A page should target both the singulars and plurals of a search
term, but give precedence to one. This manifests itself in the most
searched-for variation appearing preferentially in the meta title,
meta description and page title - and dominating the on-page
optimisation strategy for that page.

Hotels and flights - singular or plural?
Consumer search behaviour in the hotel booking industry is heavily
biased towards the singular. People looking for a hotel will
normally search for 'hotel' over 'hotels'. But most hotel booking
websites will name their pages 'hotels in London', 'hotels in
Caracas' and so on. Don't make the same mistake. But be aware that
there are exceptions. Check your destination on Google Trends
first.

In the case of flight search behaviour, the reverse is true -
most people search for 'flights' over 'flight'.

2. Make the link between
sporting events and travel

Most travel sites take seasonality into account when planning
their PPC and SEO campaigns. But where many fall down is they fail
to take other events that drive consumer demand into account. These
events temporarily increase demand for the destinations they're
held in, with searchers converting almost immediately following
their search.

The Champions League Final between Manchester United and
Chelsea, played in Moscow in 2008, resulted in a clear increase in
demand for hotels in the Russian capital, as illustrated below.

Demand for flights also increased.

While the 2004 Olympics in Athens and 2008 Olympics in Beijing
both resulted in clear increases in demand for hotel rooms.

Most major sporting events will lead to this kind of demand,
even events with a smaller following, such as the Wimbledon tennis
championship.

When planning your PPC and SEO campaigns, don't forget sporting
events. Keep a sporting calendar for the coming 12 months and
ensure your website's SEO has a temporary bias towards these
locations a month ahead of when demand for the event will start.
Similarly, see that your paid search campaigns are ready to exploit
the spike.

Our one caveat is make sure you don't bid against these
sports-influenced location searches if you don't have any inventory
left. Technology can help with this, such as Greenlight's AdApt
platform, which synchronises paid search campaigns with inventory
levels.

3. Don't forget
secondary searches

Secondary searches are the ones people make following an
initially unsuccessful search. They may be dissatisfied with the
results of 'hotels in New York' so they make a search that's more
targeted to their needs. In travel, secondary searches typically
include one or more of the following:

Create a page for each of these secondary search queries and
you'll rank in natural search (assuming you have good on-page SEO
and focused link building). These pages will open up significant
paid search opportunities to target these highly converting search
terms, as well as pushing them to relevant, tailored landing
pages.

4. Remember the SEO
value of user generated content

User generated content on travel sites is typically found in
user reviews of hotels, locations, airlines and tour operators,
plus forums. Encouraging users to post UGC can positively impact on
travel sites' SEO performance in a number of ways.

i. Using other words
Invariably, people will write differently to you, and will call
things by names you're unlikely to use yourself. Your content may
contain 'hotels in Cyprus' but a user contributing to your site may
write 'Cypriot hotels'. The benefit for your site is that it will
be seen as more relevant by search engines and will subsequently
rank better for all Cyprus related-search terms on that page.

ii. UGC keeps it unique
There is a spectacular long tail in travel search behaviour. So
there's always the risk a travel site will create lots of pages to
tap into it but won't have unique enough content. This could
diminish the site's ability to rank across the long tail, spreading
PageRank thinly across the site and inviting penalties from the
search engines. UGC helps alleviate this problem. Users will
contribute to multiple pages, making them more distinctive in the
eyes of the search engines and increasing rankings.

iii. Staying up to date
Search engines rank pages higher in their results if there's
evidence of routine updating. An updated page suggests worthiness,
timeliness and end user value. Updating your own pages every few
days can be costly and time-consuming, especially if your pages run
into hundreds of thousands. It's more cost-effective for users to
add comments in a forum or similar. What's more, searchers tend to
trust third-party comment more than less objective brand content.
While you may need to moderate UCG content, this will use fewer
resources than writing it yourself.

Routinely updated pages are visited more often by search
engines, meaning your relationship with search engine spiders will
be better than if you had a stagnant site. Your pages will get
indexed and faster - a great benefit if you have a proactive
publishing process to tap into seasonal trends and transient spikes
in demand for certain locations with new pages and promotions.

5. Tap into
trends

The travel industry is in a constant state of flux, with
different destinations growing or declining in popularity all the
time. This is based on a range of factors, including weather,
politics, movies, exchange rates and tourism boards' ad campaigns
whether people choose domestic or foreign locations for their
holidays.

Emerging travel destinations (ETD) is one of the most important
trends to watch. Ranking for an ETD in natural search is typically
easier than for another destination because your competitors will
be focusing on it less. Paid search is also cheaper for ETDs; the
lack of crowded market means click costs are not inflated the same
way they are for more popular destinations.

The Google Trends graph below represents the relative number of
people in the UK searching for 'holidays in Brazil' over the last
few years.

Note that before Christmas 2005 there were very few searches
made for holidays in Brazil, then suddenly there were peaks and
troughs in demand for a few years, with 2008 showing stable demand
throughout the year. If your site was last optimised for natural
search or you created your paid search keyword lists in 2005,
you'll have missed that Brazil can generate high levels of traffic
all year round.

Bali also shows interesting demand trends, not dissimilar to
Brazil.

Costa Rica too.

By contrast, searches for 'Spain holidays' is predictably
consistent, with natural peaks and troughs.

In terms of volume, the number of UK searchers keying in 'Spain
holidays' far exceeds those searching for holidays in each of the
ETDs. But in terms of revenue, the gap is not as wide. People
travelling to ETDs such as Brazil tend to be more affluent and less
price sensitive than those travelling to Spain. It also means the
bid prices don't escalate so much.

To summarise

Secondary searches, emerging destinations, major sporting
events, user generated content and singular and plural versions of
search terms all have the potential to impact your traffic and
sales. Consider each of these points - and you'll have every angle
of your search marketing campaign covered.

If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised in
this blog, email Andreas Pouros at [email protected]
or call him on 020 7253 7000.